The Real Value of Your Features & Benefits

Problem: Qualifying is an area where salespeople often do a poor job. As a result, when the time comes for the presentation, salespeople have normally failed to discover the real issues or get any kind of serious commitment from the prospect about what will happen if he can fix the problems.

Diagnosis: Salespeople have had feature & benefit presentations drummed into their heads for years. To make matters worse, most of the training received by salespeople focuses on learning everything possible about the products and services the company offers. Sales managers are still exhorting their troops to go out and “tell our story” and “persuade them that we are the right company for them.” In short, just go get the business at any cost. It shouldn’t be any surprise that salespeople resort to information dumps in a desperate attempt to get a sale. Features, and their associated benefits, are meaningless to the prospect unless he has a problem that the feature addresses. If he doesn’t, it’s just something that can be viewed as running the price up.

Solution: If you’re absolutely compelled to talk features and benefits, try a new approach. First, take some time to really understand what problems your product or service solves and use them to begin a discussion of pain. Start thinking at the beginning of the presentation how wonderful it would be if you could tell your story about how your new _______ fixes the _______ problem, about how your unique _______ helps the prospect do _______, and why your _______ was developed to overcome the _______ issue that most of your clients face. The problem is, most sales people lead with these but fail to get the prospect to acknowledge that they have the problems in the first place. It’s critical to qualify properly by asking the right questions. See if they have the pains that your features address. Then set yourself up to do an effective, targeted presentation.

Here’s an example. We do on-going reinforcement training because our clients tell us that they have been frustrated about spending lots of money on one or two day training events that have no lasting impact. The question to ask is, “Have you ever been concerned about spending lots of money on sending people to one or two day seminars, but seeing little or no change in their sales results?” If the answer is positive, then we would probe deeper to uncover the pain associated with the issue. Having done that, in our presentation we’d discuss how our on-going reinforcement training would address their concerns about the failure of training to provide lasting results.

See how that works? Learn how to use your features and benefits to create pain.